White renders (3Delight) despite large amount of RAM using Batch Renderer

sears2600

I'm running into a problem that's affecting my workflow. Last night, I rendered out four scenes using Dimension3D's Batch Renderer available at Renderosity. These were animated image sequences at 1280x720 in 3Delight using nothing but the default headlamp for lighting. The first three rendered out fine, but the 4th came out entirely white. It's worth noting that the first three used one set of shaders, and the fourth was a completely different set of shaders (not Iray, just in case anyone suggests that).

Prior to this, I successfully rendered out four other, similar scenes using Batch Renderer with the exact same combination of shaders without issue, so I know it's capable of this task. I therefore assume it's memory-related. However, my system has 64 GB of RAM, which I would have thought would be more than enough to cruise through this task. I need to be able to use Batch Renderer because I'm soon going back to work and will need my PC to be able to continue rendering my animations while I'm not home to maintain productivity. Any assistance or info would be appreciated.

Richard Haseltine

Sometimes Shader Mixer shaders fail to compile properly, One fix is to clear the brickyard folder in the the %AppData%/daz 3d/Studio4/Temp/Render/ folder, but a batch process won't know do that.

sears2600

Richard Haseltine said:

Sometimes Shader Mixer shaders fail to compile properly, One fix is to clear the brickyard folder in the the %AppData%/daz 3d/Studio4/Temp/Render/ folder, but a batch process won't know do that.

Bingo. Turns out the problematic shaders were made in Shader Mixer. And yeah, the batch process doesn't have an option to do that, nor can I do it myself if I'm not at the PC. And these shaders are pretty essential to what I'll be doing in my next projects especially. Thanks for the info.

Do you (or does anyone else) know of any other way around this that doesn't involve restarting DAZ or clearing that folder?

Richard Haseltine

Sometimes it's a matter of timing, so you might try having a simple scene (a promitive with the shader applied - one per shader, the actual settings of propertiesdon't matter) and place it before the scene that matters - it may then enable DS/3delight to see that the shader is there when it comes to do the render that matters. However, if iit's corrupt rather than not ready on the render start that won't help.

sears2600

Richard Haseltine said:

Sometimes it's a matter of timing, so you might try having a simple scene (a promitive with the shader applied - one per shader, the actual settings of propertiesdon't matter) and place it before the scene that matters - it may then enable DS/3delight to see that the shader is there when it comes to do the render that matters. However, if iit's corrupt rather than not ready on the render start that won't help.

That squares with what I was going to try - that is, instead of having a mixed queue with some scenes with different shaders and others with the Shader Mixer ones, building queues composed only of scenes using the Shader Mixer shaders. With my upcoming projects, my intent was to move to use these shaders entirely, so I wouldn't have any other shaders loaded but these in any given scene queue. So if I were using, say, 8 total Shader Mixer shaders for a certain set of scenes, I could assemble a queue that has all 8 of them in the first scene, and only put scenes into it that use some combination of those 8 shaders into the queue, reserving scenes that use shaders beyond those 8 to other homogenous queues. That's doable.

For any given animated sequence, I can see from frame 0 whether it's rendering properly or not, so I'd just restart if the first were an issue, then leave for the day once I know it's working. Of course, it still might not work for each subsequent scene, I suppose, but even partial success would be better than nothing. I just want to maximize the amount of frames I can render while AFK, as these projects are very high-volume, so time loss matters. Thanks for your suggestions.

Richard Haseltine

Actually forget my suggestion - the act of loading a new scene will clear the temp folder. Sorry, I wasn't thinking clearly.

sears2600

Richard Haseltine said:

Actually forget my suggestion - the act of loading a new scene will clear the temp folder. Sorry, I wasn't thinking clearly.

Hmm. Well, I think I'll still give it a try just in case. Thanks anyway. But if anyone else has any other advice or insight, I'd appreciate it.